US President Donald Trump said on Saturday he supported a deal in principle that would allow TikTok to continue to operate in the US, even as it appeared to conflict with his earlier order for China’s ByteDance to divest the video app.
ByteDance was racing to avoid a crackdown on TikTok after the US commerce department said on Friday it would block new downloads and updates to the app come Sunday. US officials had expressed concern that the personal data of as many as 100 million Americans that use the app were being passed on to China’s Communist Party government.
Trump signed an executive order on 14 August giving ByteDance 90 days to sell TikTok. The deal announced on Saturday, however, is structured as a partnership rather than a divestment.
TikTok will be owned by a new company called TikTok Global and will be headquartered in the US, possibly in Texas, Trump said. Oracle will take a 12.5% stake in TikTok Global and store all its US user data on its cloud to comply with US national security requirements, the companies said. Retail giant Walmart said it would take a 7.5% stake in TikTok Global. The implied valuation for TikTok Global as a result of these investments could not be determined.
While Oracle and Walmart said that TikTok Global will be majority-owned by US investors, this is the case only if one takes into account ByteDance’s investor base, according to a source familiar with the matter who requested anonymity to discuss the deal’s structure. This is because ByteDance will own 80% of TikTok Global, the source said.
53% US ownership
Given that US investors currently own about 40% of ByteDance, the White House will count that towards how much of TikTok Global is owned by US parties, the source added. As a result, Oracle, Walmart and ByteDance’s US investors will own, directly or indirectly, about 53% of TikTok Global, a second source said.
Beijing-based ByteDance did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Walmart and Oracle also did not offer more information on TikTok Global’s ownership structure.
It was not immediately clear what spurred the White House to compromise on its push for an outright sale of TikTok. However, the deal comes with pledges that cater to Trump’s ‘America First’ policy agenda. It also averts alienating TikTok’s young users ahead of the 3 November US election.
ByteDance agreed to create 25 000 new US jobs at TikTok, up from a little over a thousand now. Trump, who had previously called on companies such as Oracle and Walmart to pay the US a “fee” to participate in the TikTok deal, said there would also be a $5-billion US education fund as part of the deal.
“I said, you know, do me a favour, could you put up $5-billion into a fund for education so we can educate people as to the real history of our country, not the fake history,” Trump told a rally of supporters in Fayetteville, North Carolina on Saturday.
Oracle and Walmart described the agreement differently. They said that together with ByteDance top investors General Atlantic, Sequoia and Coatue, they would create an educational initiative to deliver an artificial-intelligence driven online video curriculum for children, from basic reading and math to science, history and computer engineering.
The companies did not say how much they would spend on the education initiative. However, they said TikTok Global would pay more than $5-billion in new taxes to the US treasury.
While ByteDance will get to keep TikTok’s source code under the deal, Oracle will get to inspect it. Oracle CEO Safra Catz said her company was “100% confident in our ability to deliver a highly secure environment to TikTok and ensure data privacy to TikTok’s American users, and users throughout the world”.
Catz served on Trump’s transition team in 2016, while Oracle’s co-founder and chairman, Larry Ellison, is one of the few top technology executives to openly support the US president. — Reported by Alexandra Alper, David Shepardson and Echo Wang, (c) 2020 Reuters
